💡Masks in the VSE

11.05.2016

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Moonacious greetings lads and ladies

Lately I've been digging a bit deeper into Blender's V.S.E.In the VSE you can apply awesome overlays and transitions for your extraordinary animations and films.Let's get started and open up Blender's VSE

In order to get your first results quickly you just need to load in 2 video files. (Shift + A)

Either take something from your Hard Drive or download some of these Public Domain videos which can be found on ''POND5''. It's entirely free, but they also offer other video footage for sale.

Now you need to load in both videos and align them atop of each other( Press SHIFT+A to search for your video files )Also make sure that you enable the button as indicated by the yellow line to see both your video and the VSE.

You can cut your videos as desired.( Press K to cut SELECTED [ ! ] video files at the green line )Next up load in the Tutorial Transition Sequences that I prepared for you.Note that the Tutorial Transitions are free but you can get the entire collection for 3 €( thanks for the support to those who bought it ! )😍

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import your animated masks sequence. The files are single images with (mostly) 1920x1080 resolution. When importing an image sequence, Blender automatically recognizes the files as a sequence and aligns them appropriately.

Postition the imported mask over your videos as shown

For now we can only see the mask when playing our movies( as it's the at the very top of the movie stack )( Alt + A to start playback )so just hide the mask( Select the mask sequence and press H )now select your movie file below the mask and hit N to bring up the properties shelf.

Select mask as the active modifier and select your mask sequence

The masks black values make the video transpartent, white will display your video below the mask.

In order to make the lowest video visible, you need to set your first video Blend mode ( see top of the properties panel ) to ''Alpha Over'' , so Blender can make use of the added Alpha Channel.

ET VOILA !🏋

That was easy enough I guess.But there's more to it.

We can also select one single movie file and a mask and simply overlay the animated mask to show it's black values and to make a cut as soon as the black values completely overlay the movie.

Simply select the mask and change its blend type to Multiply.( Make sure that you unhide the mask )You can either hide or delete the lower movie file.

You should get something like this.🖣

Another possibility is to use some of the custom made masks as overlays.

Just set the blending mode of your mask / overlay to ADD or Alpha Over(works with png-image sequences with transparency applied to).

You can colorize these masks then, by using the modifiers down belowI'm using a curves modifier.

To control the intensity of your new custom color you need to lower the contrast curve as shown( given that you set a custom color at R / G and/or B )

If you want to make these animated masks yourself, it's really quite easy for some of them.

I explain how to set up your scene and a few more things in this video as we create the most basic mask together:

Johannes Steidele

- head of masketing -

Just another artist from Berlin working on establishing a film studio to finance the daily pizza and beer.
The goal is to mask the mask of the mask with a mask of the mask of the mask (obviously ! ). Well that
and to mask the sun so I can't get those nasty sunburns on my head anymore